Joe’s Bar


By José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, translated by Jeff Lisle (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-85286035-6

Argentinian José Antonio Muñoz was born on July 10th 1942 in Buenos Aires and studied at the prestigious Escuela Panamericana de Arte de Buenos Aires under comics geniuses Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia before joining the prolific Francisco Solano Lopez studio at the age of 18. Soon his work was appearing in Hora Cero and Frontera Extra and he was ghosting episodes of the legendary serial Ernie Pike for his old tutor Pratt.

Through the Argentine-based Solano Lopez outfit, he began working on material for British publishing giant Amalgamated Press/IPC, but had no real feeling for the material he was producing. Moreover, like so many others, he was increasingly uncomfortable in his homeland and was compelled to leave Argentina in December 1972 as the military junta tightened its totalitarian grip on the country and increasingly clamped down on free expression and the arts, as well as all forms of overt or covert dissent.

Moving to England, Spain and later Italy, Muñoz met again fellow émigré and creative soul-mate Carlos Sampayo in Barcelona in 1974 and convinced the poet, music critic, copywriter and author to try his hand at comics. The result was the stunning noir Private Eye expressionistic masterpiece of loss and regret Alack Sinner…

The poet Sampayo, born in 1943, grew up with all the same formative experiences as his artistic comrade and, after a similar dispiriting start (he had tried writing and being a literary editor before resigning himself to work in advertising), had moved to Spain in 1972.

The pair had first briefly met in 1971 when mutual friend Oscar Zarate (who wrote one of the two introductions in this collection) left Argentina in the forefront of the creative exodus sparked by the rise of “the Colonels”…

Urged by old mentor Hugo Pratt to “do something of your own” the pair began producing the adventures of an ex-New York cop turned Shamus, haunting the shadows of the world’s greatest, darkest city, encountering the bleak underbelly of the metropolis and all the outcasts, exiles and scum thrown together at its margins. The series debuted in experimental Italian anthology Alter Linus, then was picked up by Belgian giant Casterman for (A Suivre) and compiled in a number of albums.

Inexplicably there have been no English-language collections of the stunningly superb saga since a proposed 12-issue series from Fantagraphics was curtailed and cancelled after 5 volumes in the late 1980s, although a couple of short stories also appeared in anthology magazines Prime Cuts and Raw.

All that necessary preamble at last leads us to Joe’s Bar – which appeared as a dingy watering hole in the very first Alack Sinner story ‘The Webster Case’ – and soon began running as a parallel, occasional series featuring and indeed often debuting characters who would spring into stories and series of their own. In 1988 Titan Books released a British edition of Catalan Communications’ single volume of short stories from the place where nobody wants to know your name, and it remains one of the very best noir graphic novels ever released in English… and is similarly absent from modern publishing schedules.

The bar is situated in a multi-ethnic melting pot that covers the worst part of the city and acts as a crossroads and crucible for a vast cast of lost, lonely and desperate characters just trying to get by one night at a time and, following that aforementioned ‘Muñoz & Sampayo: a Profile’ by Zarate and an introduction from British comics historian Paul Gravett, the horror and heartache begins with a taciturn young man who earns his living cooking and cleaning in the greasy dive.

‘Pepe, the Architect’ is an illegal immigrant caught in the Green Card trap – no work without the card, no card without a job. Only Joe knows his secret, even the desperate lad’s girlfriend has no idea of his shameful status, but when the assassination of a foreign ambassador uptown sends hordes of cops into the teeming Diaspora district, Pepe sees himself inevitably exposed, captured and deported to the land where torturers eagerly await him…

Imagining hunters at every corner, the lad is picked up by a woman hungry for any kind of warmth but Pepe’s paranoia overwhelms his lust and he attacks her, leaving her for dead before heading back to the Bar. Unable to work, swiftly getting far too drunk, the fugitive architect shares his story with an old black man who’s seen far too much misery, unaware that the night holds more grief in store…

‘Rusty Stories’ opens as broken-down, punch-drunk old fighter Moses Man shambles through the grimy the streets, until he’s recognised by current wrestling champ Tigran Pacha. The latest hotshot offers the shattered legend a big purse for an “exhibition match” – grappler versus boxer – simultaneously wondering how such a legend could fall so low. With Man cleaning up for his big comeback, the memories return and, with visions of gamblers and gangsters, mad hubris and the wrong kind of woman boiling in his battered brain, when he finally gets back in the ring he ignores the fix and things get far too serious…

Muñoz & Sampayo brilliantly rewrote the rules that make comics work with their stark, vivid, ugly pictures describing deep, often elliptical personal journeys of complex characters with no beginning and often no appreciable end. Moreover individual tales frequently intersected and overlapped, as with the meat of the next piece.

‘Ella’ is a photographer. She’s often taken candid shots of that P.I. Sinner, Pepe the dishwasher, the bum Moses Man and all the other hopeless characters at the Bar, but now she’s the one in the depths. Convinced she is dying, she constantly re-examines her brief passionate affair with that mysterious black guy and wonders if race really does matter. Why did he leave her that way? What was going on? And then, on the bustling street she sees him and everything becomes clear…

The drama ends with the tragic ‘Fifth Story’ wherein a guy in prison shares his story with a cellmate…

Everything was going okay for young Mike Weiss. The store was doing fine and he’d finally blundered into asking that Feldman girl out – over ice cream and in the bar, yet. Of course she eventually had to take the initiative but that was fine too. Then his beloved old man got the cancer and started wasting way. As his father shrivelled Mike retreated into food, gorging himself into a stupor as his father dwindled into a dry husk filled with pain.

Even Rosa couldn’t reach him then. All he wanted was bad food and release from his father’s ghastly, continual pleas. Anyway, what kind of parent begs a loving son to kill him?

When life couldn’t get any worse, Mike was jumped by thugs in the street who dealt him another shattering blow which galvanised the poor schmuck into finally ending his dad’s pain. But even in jail poor Mike’s woes hadn’t quite ended…

Whilst the plots are deliberately generic, pimping starting points from a hundred pulp stories and noirish B-movies, the choice, fresh meat of the stories comes from the spotlight shining on those grotesque, useless inconsequential strangers and bystanders left behind once the flawed, noble heroes and glittering sultry sirens have moved on, especially once Muñoz casts his highly stylised, excoriatingly expressionistic vision upon them and their harsh, uncompromising, inescapable world.

Concentrating on the peripheral shadows and unturned corners of that grim shared universe where Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain and the rest ply their trade, Muñoz & Sampayo have created a fierce and unforgettable environment that is truly and uniquely pure comics.

Dark, bleak, sordid and tawdry, the lives coinciding and congealing at Joe’s Bar offer a truly astonishing view of the other side of the world, one that no lover of truly mature fiction could bear to tear appalled yet fascinated eyes away from.
© 1987 Carlos Sampayo & José Muñoz. Introductions © Oscar Zarate, Paul Gravett & Art Spiegelman.